Change Page Magnification in Acrobat CS5

Adobe Acrobat Creative Suites 5 provides several preset viewing options to help you zoom in and out of your PDF document. Adobe provides several preset viewing options and you can also customize the magnification.

If things are a bit too small for you to see clearly, increase the magnification used for viewing pages with the Zoom drop-down list in the toolbar. Preset magnification choices are available in this drop-down list. You can also use the minus (–) and plus (+) symbols to the left of the current magnification level to zoom out or in.

The Marquee Zoom tool is the magnifying glass icon located to the left of the minus and plus symbols. You can use the Marquee Zoom tool to identify specific portions of a page that you want to magnify. Select this tool and then click and drag around a portion of the page to increase the magnification.

You can also click multiple times on an area with this tool to increase the page magnification, but clicking and dragging a box with the Marquee Zoom tool is generally a much faster way to focus on a portion of a page you want to view.

You can change the Marquee Zoom from its default attribute of increasing the magnification to decreasing the zoom by selecting the Marquee Zoom tool and Ctrl-clicking (Windows) or Option-clicking (Mac) in the Document window. The magnifier’s plus (+) sign changes to a minus sign (–) to indicate that you’re decreasing the document’s magnification. It’s usually faster to choose a preset zoom percentage though.

To the right of the magnification percentage box are page buttons that you can use to change the page magnification:

Scrolling Pages: Use this button to avoid scrolling from left to right when reading a document.

The view is changed to fit the document’s width in the available space on your display, making it necessary to only scroll up and down on a page. This also sets the page view to display the top or bottom of adjacent pages. When you scroll and reach the bottom of one page, the top of the next page becomes visible.

One Full Page: Use this button to fit the current page within the available screen space on your monitor.

For smaller documents, such as a business card, the magnification is increased. For larger documents, the magnification is generally decreased unless you have a large monitor. When viewing pages in the Fit Page mode, only one page is displayed at a time. This mode is good for viewing the entire display of a page layout.